


a blue heart in the dark

by neutrophilic



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:58:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neutrophilic/pseuds/neutrophilic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As soon as Rita turned away from the bar, with two drinks, despite her protests, in hand, she noticed Cage sitting off to himself in a corner. Her internal debate about whether to join him or shove the drinks at some random stranger and go back to her hotel, hopefully unnoticed, didn’t last very long. Just long enough for her to cross the room and stand before him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a blue heart in the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SummerRed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerRed/gifts).



As soon as Rita turned away from the bar, with two free drinks, despite her protests, in hand, she noticed Cage sitting off to himself in a corner. Her internal debate about whether to join him or shove the drinks at some random stranger and go back to her hotel, hopefully unnoticed, didn’t last very long. Just long enough for her to cross the room and stand before him.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked.

Cage startled. So he hadn’t seen her. She wondered how long it would take for her to stop cataloguing every single person that walked within twenty meters of her.

“No, no,” he replied, removing a leather coat from the top of the stool next to him.

Rita put down her pints and sat. There wasn’t much space around the table and her knee jammed into his before they both adjusted. He was close enough that she could feel the heat from his body along her right side.

“Have you been back in London long?” Rita asked after an uncomfortably long silence, to stop herself from asking, yet again, how he was completely sure that the Omega was gone.

The last and only time that Rita could remember them talking had lasted about twenty minutes before she was pulled away. They had covered the essentials, namely, that he’d killed the Omega, with her help, and that he’d been like her. They might have been able to cover more ground, Rita acknowledged to herself later, if she hadn't kept interrupting to hear his description of its death again.

She’d then spent the next three weeks traveling to most major western European cities, participating in an increasingly ceremonial sweep for Mimics, and thinking about what she could do if their victory was an illusion, a ruse by the enemy. Not much, she’d concluded.

The last city on the list had finally been Paris. Rita had managed to slip away for a few hours and make it down into the sub-basement where Cage had told her the Omega had been. A large black stain unevenly covering the sides and bottom of a damp crevasse was the only evidence left that it had ever been there. It'd been much less cathartic to see than she’d hoped it would be. Still, it wasn't nothing, and it was worth the grief she got when she returned.

"Yesterday," Cage replied. "I'm supposed to go back to America tomorrow."

"Home?"

"No," he said flatly, "I'm going to be the guest on some very popular Sunday morning talking head shows. They want to talk to someone that's been there for the liberation of Europe."

Rita pushed her extraneous beer towards Cage's elbow. 

"No thanks," he said, "they water it down here anyways."

Rita shrugged and picked up her own glass. It tasted fine to her, maybe slightly weaker than she liked, but good enough that she wasn't going to need to struggle through it. "Not mine," she said, after drinking a third of hers. 

Cage grabbed the pint she'd offered to him and tried it. "You're right," he said, "not yours."

Rita tipped her glass at him in acknowledgement and began to apply herself to the problem of her hair. As soon as she'd gotten back to London, she'd been informed that she'd be attending a number of different victory benefits and dinners to contribute to the effort of raising funds to rebuild Europe. She'd wanted to refuse, she wanted to go home or apply herself to the actual real issue that any asteroid in the sky could be harboring more Mimics. But at this point she knew the General considerably better than he thought she did, and she didn't need to be dragged in front of him to be given her marching orders personally.

Tonight had been the first of them. Rita had left the banquet hall as soon as she could, definitely early enough to be rude, but she'd been past the point of caring. Rita had been sure that if she'd had to plaster her best fake smile, which was barely above a grimace--according to the many, many media trainers she'd been coerced into listening to--and hear another person express gratitude for all that she'd done for the war effort, she'd earn the moniker 'the bitch of Verdun' all over again. 

So she'd fled to her hotel room, telling herself that retreat was sometimes the better part of valor, stripped off her appallingly expensive gown, and scrubbed at her face in the mirror, trying in vain to get off all the makeup that had been spackled onto her. She'd left her hair in the elaborate updo that she'd been halfway impressed that a hairdresser had been able to manage, hoping that it would help make her less recognizable. Not so much, and now pins were digging into her scalp, interfering with her attempts to enjoy her alcohol. She used to dream about beer, back on the battlefield, and her younger self would have been disgusted that some minor physical discomfort could put her off it even slightly.

She dropped as many of the pins as she could locate in the center of the small table. 

"You almost never wear your hair down," Cage said, interrupting her search. 

Rita stilled, her fingers around the latest pin. She didn't like the reminder that the man sitting next to her most likely knew her better than anyone else in the world, probably even beating out her own mother. They might have spent years, decades, together and no matter how hard she might have tried, things about herself would have slipped out without her meaning to. By the time Hendricks had died in front of her for the last time, but not the last time he'd died, not by a long shot, she could have written his biography. She could have told anyone how he'd react to any possible situation. If it weren't for the obvious physical differences, she could have taken over his life and been him and nobody would have been the wiser.

And Rita didn't know anything about Cage besides his name and the fact that he'd been good enough to succeed where she failed and take out the Omega. 

She fished the last pin out and held it in front of her. "Well it was war, wasn't it?" She thought about braiding her hair up again and decided against it. It was peacetime now, she was mostly sure of it. She chugged the rest of her lager in celebration and for a lack of anything better to do. 

Cage followed her lead and then sat silently. He had to have know that she wouldn't like that remark and decided to make it anyways. Rita wasn't sure if she found the idea of him going ahead more or less annoying.

"Cage," Rita interrupted, "you want to get another round?"

"Bill," he said, "that's my name."

"Bill?" Rita said, "did I ever call you that?"

"No."

"Do you want more beer?" she asked, cheered.

In lieu of a response, he got up from the table and made his way to the bar. He returned in short order with another pint for her and a glass of water for himself. Still long enough for her to realize that most of the other patrons were not very subtly looking at her out of the corners of their eyes.

Depositing it in front of her, he said, "they wouldn't let me pay for it."

"They wouldn't let me pay earlier," Rita said. "Couldn't charge a war hero for it, is what he said. Imagine what he would have done if he knew what you did.”

Cage grimaced. “There’s a pub not far from here,” Cage said, “where I went the time I deserted. I was going to drink there tonight but it wasn’t open.” He took a sip of his water. “That time, I made it to about noon the next day before the Mimics came up the channel to kill everybody.”

Rita considered her response for a moment, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “When I deserted, I didn’t go to any pubs. I made it a month and a half.”

He turned to look at her fully, and she could feel the full weight of his attention on her. Not that she had any doubt that he had been paying her any less than one hundred percent of his attention ever since she sat down next to him, but she was made aware of it all over again. She thought that this meant that she hadn’t told him this before, and she felt lighter at the thought. Almost warm from it.

“I stayed holed up at my mum’s place for a month until a neighbor turned me in. It took two weeks for me to get shipped out to a battle and as soon as they let me near a gun,” Rita trailed off.

“I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

“I wasn’t the same person at the start that I was at the end.” Rita contemplated her drink. Now that it was here, she wasn't sure that she still wanted it. Not if she was going to have to drink it in front of everybody in the whole place.

"I don't like the person that I used to be," Cage said, "before. I was too glib."

That wouldn't be how Rita would describe herself before Verdun, but she understood the sentiment. She stood up. "I'm going to turn in."

He turned away from her, but she still caught how his face closed up first. She hadn't meant it as a rejection, and she'd assumed that he knew he well enough to gather that.

"Are you staying then?" she asked, "Come on."

He followed her silently for the length of a block, before stopping.

"My hotel is in the completely opposite direction," he said.

"Do you have your phone on you?" she asked, still not entirely sure if she wanted to talk to him again or if she'd rather he'd go back to America and forget everything about her that she couldn't remember to ask about.

He handed it over. His thumb brushed hers, and she felt it all the way up her arm. She put her number in.

"You can call me if you like," she said.

"I will," he promised. She spent the rest of the walk back thinking about what she'd say to him when he did, namely if there were other things she could tell him about herself that he didn't know and she wouldn't mind sharing. Better than thinking about benefits or Mimics or the rest of it, even if the list appeared to consist of one thing. That there was a good chance that she'd like to know him one day even better than he knows her.


End file.
